Exhibition "Cabanes d'Architectes"

Last year, the Donjon housed the « Cabanes d’Architectes » exhibition, where Philippe Gravier was invited to expose the collection of transportable architectures that he initiated. Some of these cabanes made in a monumental format are still exposed in the Donjon’s gardens.

The editor of Folies, builder of cabanes since 2015, a trade he invented to take architecture out of its lack of measure and make it available to all. He liberates it from its utilitarian injunction, to consider it as sculpture and pave the way to experimentation.

With his architects’ cabanes, Philippe Gravier can built cities with marvels. Pavilions made of wood, tulle, glass and steel, « inundated by air and light”, to quote Salomon Reinach.

These nomadic houses all entertain a lyrical relationship with architecture. They nevertheless all look different from one another. The cabanes edited by Philippe Gravier are architectures with a specific yet undetermined usage. They are cocoons and homes.

Never before had these cabanes been gathered together. They find in the Donjon de Vez a remarkable shrine between the medieval architecture and Pascal Cribier’s garden, but also resonate with the permanent exhibition, most notably Serge Mansau’s Yourte and Tadashi Kawamata’s Nids Perchés.

From this emerges a assembly of raw materials, an inspiring anticlassic architecture breaking with tradition, reminiscent of Henri Michaux’s poem :

I shall build you a city with rags !
I shall build with no plan or cement
an edifice that you shall not destroy
and that a kind of foaming obviousness
will support and grow, which will come bray at your noses,
and at the frozen noses of your Parthenons, arabian arts and Mings.

In keeping with Kengo Kuma, they all discredit the way the 20th century made architecture monumental to everyone’s detriment and relationship with nature. The 21st century will be that of cabanes.